Honey Roundup

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.” – Louis Adamic

Over the weekend, I attended a tasting event featuring the fermented honey drink known as mead, which sparked me to think about all of the ways to cook with honey. When I write honey, I may just as well write sweetness, for the ingredient is most always that, but it can also be mildly spicy, floral, even buttery in its raw form owing to the blossoms visited by the bees.

Recipes follow below, but first a note about mead. Steeped in legend, mead has been at various times medicine or holy drink, sometimes both, since ancient times. Chemical evidence places the earliest confirmed version in the Jiahu village of China around 7000 B.C., where it was combined with a drink made of wild grapes, hawthorn, and rice. Today’s meaderies often add grapes and other fruit during the fermentation process to make a class known as melomels, which includes the apple and honey drink known as ceyser (cider fans take note!).

Though one of the oldest recipes for mead is found in the Roman De Re Rustica (On Agriculture) by Columella, perhaps the most striking ingredient is found in Norse mythology. If you’ve ever wanted to be able to answer any question, wisdom might be attained by drinking the Mead of Poetry, which was made with the blood of Kvasir, a wise being who spent his time spreading knowledge before being murdered by two dwarves. The history of mead is a little Game of Thrones-esque.

Add fruit, spices, hops, or maybe even mythical blood, but without honey, you can’t make mead. Without bees, well…The history of mead is tied not only to legend but to the art of beekeeping, the literature that celebrates it, and the changing popularity of its taste. As with hard cider, which had a revival that sparked numerous brands and varieties, mead is on the rise. I’ve tried some versions before and generally have found them too sweet for my liking, but some of the newer ones to the market are lighter and drier, even featuring ingredients such as lemongrass, ginger, and black currant.

When cooking with honey, I often experiment with combinations too. Here are some recipes featuring the delicious results:

Coconut Honey Lace Cookies: Lace cookies are sweet, crispy thins all the more enticing because they break so easily.

Honey Rum Apple Crumble: Warm butter, sticky honey, and Honeycrisp apples are the key to the delicious filling in this crumble.

Spinach Salad with Pickled Red Onions, Manchego, and Honeyed Walnuts: With such intense flavor, the only dressing needed for this spinach salad is a drizzle of olive oil.

Roasted Strawberry and Black Sesame Granola Bars: Most granola bar recipes call for dried fruit, but I prefer roasted berries as they become jam-like when baked in an oat mixture with honey.

Chocolate Squares with Honeyed Apricots and Coconut: Taste your way through this recipe as you drizzle, melt, and pinch to create tempting squares that invoke the Mediterranean and the tropics.